Blogs

Since 2006, Radical Reference has been providing online reference services to activists, journalists and researchers who requested help looking for information and resources. Over the years, we've answered questions that have ranged in scope from mail tampering in prison to the history of radical education to the future of librarianship. Yet as we’ve evaluated the quality and efficacy of this service, we’ve been confronted with difficulties of providing in-depth answers in a timely way. As a result, we've decided collectively to suspend this service indefinitely.

This decision was not reached easily, as for many of us, answering reference questions has been a vital part of fulfilling the Radical Reference mission statement of supporting activist communities, progressive organizations, and independent journalists by providing professional research support, education, and access to information. Nevertheless, we've decided to suspend reference services in order to concentrate on other areas of activism, including connecting activists to librarians on a local level, maintaining and developing information resources on the website, and using social media to connect people interested in information activism.
For general online reference support, we can point you to ASK NYPL, your local public library, the Internet Public Library, or Ask MetaFilter.

Radical Reference is a collective of volunteer library workers who believe in social justice and equality. We support activist communities, progressive organizations, and independent journalists by providing professional research support, education and access to information. From 2004 until around 2012, the NYC collective of Radical Reference met regularly, put on events, and participated in activist communities.

Do you want to meet and collaborate with other anti-authoritarian library workers and LIS students in the NYC area? Come to the Radical Reference NYC local collective's first meeting in more than five years. For now our plan is to focus on whether there is interest in reviving the collective and if so, what that would look like.

The photo, from 2004 article in The Indypendent, is of Torie Quiñonez and Lia Friedman at a protest against the Republican National Convention in NYC. Torie and Lia live in San Diego now, but they still have a NYC home in our hearts.

Earlier today, Temple University hosted a talk with a series of archivists and librarians about documenting and preserving social movements. Speakers included Bergis Jules (University of California Riverside Libraries), Meredith Evans (Washington University in St. Louis) and Ed Summers (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities), who described their work archiving protest movements surrounding Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter, and Margery Sly and Justin Hill from Temple Libraries, who shared experiences from archiving Occupy Philly. It was a really rich discussion, covering pragmatics of data scraping tools as well as advice on how to build ties with communities whose lives are being preserved. Here are some highlights that I wanted to share!

Bergis Jules highlighted the accessibility of social media as a source for data, calling it “a new layer of documentation quality" that has “left an extremely rich trail of documentation in one of the most rich and accessible” platforms. Jules also noted that social media content can be used against protesters in prosecution, which is crucial to consider in policies of collection and access.

Tomorrow is a international day of action for demanding social justice in the wake of systemic disregard for black lives. We've pulled together some reading sources for people interested in learning more about social justice, race and the police. Feel free to add more in the comments, see you in the streets!

Tomorrow is 404 Day, an effort from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to raise awareness of online censorship in libraries and public schools. They’re running an online info session today at noon, PST, and they’ve reached out to librarians and information professionals to share experiences with online censorship.

The specter of the surveillance state looms over every aspect of radical organizing and community building. For most of us, Edward Snowden's revelations only confirmed what we suspected all along; the state has access to almost everything we create electronically, and they have the capacity and will to retain it indefinitely. Yet all surveillance is not created equal, and it's useful to remember that while we may never know the full extent of the information collected from us, FOIA, FOIL, and sunshine laws do entitle the public to see the investigative files collected on us.

Join Radical Reference and Mutant Legal for a night of information sharing and collective information seeking about the state of state surveillance and how to obtain your FBI files. Paper, envelopes, and snacks will be available by donation!